From one response:

Github offers hosting of closed source projects, while Gitorious is all FOSS

Seems like a no-brainer to me. How many people develop absolutely nothing but open source projects that share 100% of their code from day zero? It stands to reason that a lot of programmers don't fall into that category.

(And even if I were paid to develop nothing but open-source software, I would occasionally want private repositories. I don't want to continuously display 100% of my prerelease code to the whole world. Looks like Gitorious has finally started to figure this out, years late: http://www.mail-archive.com/gitorious@googlegroups.com/msg01...)

And who wants to set up two Git hosts when one will do? (Even if Git does make it really easy to use more than one?)

Point taken, but I assume that those guys that want to protect their code from the outside might want to go for a complete in-house solution as well, instead of storing it in the cloud (I know that this is the big thing now and all, but let's assume that I'm not the only one that likes to have local storage, local backup and local basic/essential services).

Those can grab gitorious and set it up locally. Takes (depending on experience with linux, rails etc) half a day for your first installation and you have the same thing running in your office/vpn. With all your closed source precious projects.

That's a heavy assumption. If you're wrong, the result is that Gitorious doesn't fit for potentially a large number of developers.

In my experience, sampling developers with whom I speak on a regular basis (and myself), private repos on GitHub are very popular. This is especially the case for web developers, as open sourcing web apps is less common. It's nice to have all of my open source stuff in the same place as my closed source stuff, such that I (and anyone I deem worthy) can interact with both in the same way.

Agreed. The assumption _is_ heavy and I even have the same sample set around. But only if you look at either small companies/freelancers/startups (Yes, I know where I'm posting this).

For corporations (read: Process, more process, and some paperwork) that I had to work with this would not be possible. Deploying this strange new thing instead of clearcase/perforce/team services internally? Hard to sell maybe, but possible. Putting your source up somewhere else, out of control: No way.

Especially for verticals where the law heavily influences your ability to share just about any data (depending on country and laws this might include insurance companies, banks, energy provider, probably quite some more).

I've tried this route and the problem is that my company wants some open-source stuff and some closed source stuff. So a private Gitorious setup isn't great because we can't put our open-source stuff there.

If self-hosted Gitorious allowed for private & public projects then I could let it face the internet and have the perfect solution. I've seen a few implementations of private projects with merge requests, but sadly the Gitorious team has largely ignored them.

Don't want to be the gitorious fanboy here. I'm using both and I'm not involved with either project (although I kind of run an internal gitorious instance here at work).

I have to agree with you: Both on one server is not possible. The only way to make this work would be cumbersome:

Install a public and a private instance of gitorious. For private projects: Works just as before. For public projects: Push to somewhere and make the post-receive hook propagate the change to public/private.

Ugly? Hell, yes. It's nothing but a workaround.

On the other hand: You can mix GitHub and Gitorious just fine. Your client (if you use one, or the git cli) doesn't care about the hosts, so having http://myPrivateGitorious repositories next to http://github.com repositories would work fine and you gain the best of both worlds. It's the same system. You can easily push/pull/merge from one to the other, it's not like the decision to use one or the other has to be an XOR.

After getting fed up with Gitorious I made GitHaven (http://www.githaven.com/) which allows you to have public and private repositories and comes with a much simpler installer to boot.

For me it seem that the difference between these two hosts is probably more about mentality rather than if their source code is all open.

The github guys want to make money with git and gitorious people, well, just want an easy to host git repositories.

The project is supported by a company alright, but it seem to be more of a subsidiary rather than as a way to make money.

I, personally, want companies to profit from open source as directly as possible. It gives me comfort that Github is trying to turn a profit.

this is why i don't get it that pivotal doesn't charge for tracker. it would make me feel better.

I really think the answer has to do with Github's take on what a "public" view looks like. They focus on the actual files (which is the primary use case of a repo host) and then they focus on the README file (the WHAT), and finally focuses on the contributors (the WHO). It's not as pretty as Gitorious, but it is functional and clear and it gives me a clear indication of what I'm getting out of the site and why I should care.

The ability to link to the Github 'public page' also helps make it go viral -- I never actually ended up in Github's homepage until today, I always ended up there because of a link I followed for an open source project, and then was upsold to sign up and set up a private repository.

On the other hand, Gitorious doesn't make it obviously easy to find the public repositories, makes their front page look like yet another project management site and even when you click on one of the obscure links for a public repo, you're shown a bunch of Activity feeds which doesn't mean anything to the typical visitor.

I think the hardest thing to do with WebApps is to show the user what a "humming" version of the app looks like, how a productive user of the site can use the WebApp. Github does this excellently while Gitorious does not.

Does anyone else notice how all the top ranked answers address the technical differences between GitHub and Gitorious? GitHub certainly has a great product, but that is not a sufficient condition for being popular (it may not even be necessary). I don't know how GitHub got a head start, but the answer to their continuing success is the network effect.

Just goes to show how there will almost always be different communities online with differing levels of focus.

StackOverflow's community clearly values the intricacies of tech.

If this conversation was happening in a LinkedIn group, I can imagine many more discussions on distribution models, market size, or even strategic partnerships.

HN has the unique blend of tech+business providing unique insights and answers that takes a lot of these different factors into consideration.

> I don't know how GitHub got a head start,

Check out Tom's story about it: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-3...

One of the things I love about the Ruby community is that it truly embraces change. Rubyists (and particularly Rails hackers) jumped on git, and since GitHub was built by our own, it was supported heavily by Rubyists. Engine Yard gave them free hosting for a long time, we blogged and told all of our friends, and like any social network, it just grew from there.

It also helps that it's an awesome service.

There's also more book that talk about github.. or the book that I have actually read talk about github and not other services. Also, in the same idea, github has a better marketing visibility.

Agreed. Other responses here explain some of the original popularity of github. At this point though I also think github has a huge amount of momentum. I had not heard of gitorious until reading this post (granted I use mercurial, not git), but I see references to github everywhere.

Gitorious needs a "documentation" link on its front page leading to at least "overview" and "getting started" docs.

Also, as an aside, Gitorious should consider switching to a new logo, or none at all, and then choose a lighter colorscheme for the site. The current theme reminds me of a hospital room at night.

Seriously; if you ask around and find that people really can't seem to come up with a good reason why they use Github instead of Gitorious, this is why.

Sidenote: that thread is more than one year old (mid 2009)

Path dependence matters.